How would you knit a product placement for a gum with human emotions? High school romance, okay it isn’t a cliché but believe me it still works with the voice of Elvis, at least it has worked for Wrigley’s sugar free Extra Gum. The brand has done it once again by creating a story that has garnered over four million views in less than a week.

Two years after Extra Gum delivered the sensational 23 million views Origami video, the brand has come up with a new commercial “The Story of Sarah & Juan”, a high school romance with a heart-moving ending. Their epic romance begins in high school and stretches through the tear-jerking trials and tribulations of college life and young adulthood. The video uses Extra wrappers as the connecting point in which Sarah and Juan learn to share their lives.

Created by Energy BBDO and directed by Rattling Stick’s Pete Riski, the two-minute film also has the subtle role of the gum in the story since Juan often draws memories of the two together on Extra wrappers, and incorporates them into his proposal to her. The video runs over the cover of Elvis Presley’s ‘I Can’t Help Falling in Love’.

With this latest effort the brand attempts to build on the initial success of the ‘Get Extra, give extra’ campaign. As stated earlier, this is a follow-up to Extra’s massive hit ‘Origami’ video that rolled out two years ago, which told a similarly sentimental story of a father-daughter relationship.

“The ‘Origami’ spot resonated particularly well with audiences, so we let it live on,”Energy BBDO executive creative director Andrés Ordoñéz told Adweek to explain why it took so long for the brand to come up with a new ad. “It was still working well for the business, so we didn’t want to take it off air too soon.”

Going by the numbers, the conventional ad has got a major spike in less than a week. With insights from Unmetric, social media monitoring product the ad has seen a hockey stick growth and it is not seeing any fall as of now.

This has impacted the overall channel growth in terms of views and subscribers. Both of them are having a steep growth which should be a good news for the brand as well as the agency. “The chemistry between our lead actors was so good, people were tearing up on set during the first scene on day one. We knew we had a beautiful story to share,” added Andrés.

The below screen grab shows you the overall channel growth which spiked after the brand uploaded the new video.

Surprisingly, the video hasn’t been uploaded on Facebook page but finds space on its Twitter brand page. The video has been retweeted more than 9.6K times. In addition to this the brand is sharing exclusive creative on the wrapper to the lucky ones.

However, not everyone is going mushy about the ad. “My only criticism of this ad is the ending. As in, the very end type card and voiceover, Give Extra. Get Extra. Given the brand name of the gum is unfortunately vacant to start with, I suppose that ending isn’t horrible. And the sentiment reminds me of The Beatles’, “The love you take is equal to the love you make.” But the voiceover and cheesy animation cheapened the ending to me because it could have been on any ad,” said Will Burns on his piece at Forbes.